November 7, 2010 Beats
Do you remember Physics class, those problem sets you’d have to solve? About the train whipping past you on the tracks at 50 miles per hour towards the East and someone is throwing a ball inside the train at 20 miles per hour in the same direction that the train is heading?
They were supposed to illustrate how time is relative depending on where you’re standing, and if you’re inside the train, the ball would be going at 20 miles an hour. If you’re standing alongside the tracks, looking into the window of the train, the ball would be going at 70, because the ball, in addition to travelling at 20 per on its own accord, is also being carried inside the train going at 50.
The only exception here is light. Light travels at 186,000 miles per second no matter where you’re standing. This is why, when you look up at the stars, you’re actually seeing them as they were in the past. The light from Proxima Centauri, the closest star besides the sun, takes 4.3 years to reach our Earth-bound eyes.
I’m not entirely sure why, but I find some strange sort of comfort in knowing that time is slowed by great distances. When the thought of my own death creeps into my brain and jabs me in the gut, as it does from time to time, I remind myself that Einstein’s theory of relativity says that the past, present, and future are all playing out in tandem, that the so-called “flow of time” is just an illusion.
Did you know that each living creature has about two billion heartbeats to spend in its lifetime? And the expected lifespan of the creature doesn’t matter—that our hearts can thump out those two billion beats slowly, or they can trill and fizzle out in a matter of days?
I keep trying to find ways to slow time in my own life. I keep having to remind myself that, with any luck, I still have about 65 percent of my life ahead of me.
My greatest fear is Nothing, with a capital N. The sights and sounds and smells I register are comforting reminders that I am somewhere. I don’t want to give them up, ever. I want to stay here and see the white paint chipping on my windowsill, to smell the tired, gray scent of lingering cigarette smoke, to hear the clicking and sledge-hammer banging sounds my radiator makes when it begins to heat up. I want the sun in the morning and the moon at night and chocolate-flavored tortilla chips when the mood strikes. I want the kind of love that keeps me up at night, then trapped in bed way past noon. I want to slow the beats. But I also want to feel like I’m part of something larger, some big grand Human Story. I want us to be happy. And sad. And really fucking angry. I want people to fall down in the dirt and wake up in the middle of the night to their loud, obnoxious ancient radiators, to make love and make mistakes, to wonder and marvel, to believe stupid things, to catch tadpoles and spend money and read the paper. To get caught up in soap operas and cry when they’ve had too much gin. To empathize and sympathize and get really really jealous.
And I don’t know why. To exist is to fall prey to the intoxicating prospect of eternity. And we become its slaves, finding Forever in art and ideals and ideas and offspring. But why? Why do we live to live? Where’s the fear in not existing?
I am the grandchild of the restless building blocks of the universe, the residual dust of cosmic bodies. I want to build, to create, too. To build a small universe of my own. And I’m not religious, but one time I bought 99 cent prayer candles at the back corner of the CVS among old bottles of witch hazel and elephantine tubs of Spanish hair gel. And I lit them when I got home, and asked an open-ended Why? to no one in particular, and waited for an answer.
But there is no answer as to why. The universe exists because it does. It doesn’t share our obsessive need to find meaning in itself. I am trying to become comfortable living in the dark. I am trying to soothe my constant state of questioning. Why am I afraid to stop asking for a while? Am I afraid to lose the questions altogether? To forget to ask? The truth is, once you quiet the question, you know why. You can’t articulate it, but there are moments when you know. Like when the weather’s perfect and you have nothing you have to do that day, or when you finally finish writing a twenty page paper, or when you have a really good conversation with someone about time, because of course you can never get enough time, or enough of said person, and if they were on a train going by at 50 miles per hour towards the East relative to the tracks, and you were standing alongside those tracks, you’d run as fast as you could to hear their stories about falling down in the dirt and catching tadpoles.
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